A handy chronological coincidence meant
that I followed up my viewings of Over
There and Berlin Hanover
Express with a few days in Berlin itself. (And by the
way, why do Ian Kennedy Martin’s characters get so exercised about a
concentration camp some 80 miles from Berlin when Sachsenhausen was
almost within the city limits?) Alas, I didn’t get to see the
Schaubühne’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s Der Stein to compare with its
recent Royal Court outing, and the Hamlet
I did catch was rather disappointing compared to previous
encounters with Thomas Ostermeier’s directorial work (although it
features an excellent, playfully mad/madly playful central performance
from Lars Eidinger). I was also intrigued, to say the least, to
discover that mid-May will see the German première of The Producers. Moreover, I
must acknowledge a mail I received from Mark Ravenhill about my
Financial Times review of Over There.
Mark took slight exception to my description of him as an “in-yer-face
godfather”; he is, he insists, the genre’s fairy godmother.

Fracas

But whilst in some respects enveloped by notions of Germanness, my most
striking experience concerned English identity (a matter on which I
consider myself to have an outsider’s perspective). For I finally
got a chance to see Richard Bean’s England
People Very Nice at the National Theatre. Now, when the
fracas about this play first boiled up, I had commented on various
blogs in dismissal of the protests, but had said that if I thought
differently after seeing the play I would declare as much
publicly. Having now seen it, I have to admit, the protesters
have something of a point.

Not about racism as such, at least not in the way that they mean: as
one blogger remarked, Richard Bean is an equal-opportunities piss-taker
– he mocks everybody regardless of ethnicity. Certainly, when I
think about the portrayal of the Irish in the play and about the
protests of one Keith Kinsella about the alleged racism thereof, I
can’t imagine that his outrage was anything but confected in order to
make the complaints look less than entirely
Bangladeshi-Muslim-centred. But as one character in the play –
and, tellingly, a member of the British National Party – remarks, this
kind of debate is not about skin colour any more, but culture.
Bean’s target is Islamism, and
he isn’t very good or very diligent at distinguishing it from Islam per se.

Hatred

Islamism isn’t the subject of more than trace levels of piss-taking in
the play; it’s the subject of outright hostility. Granted, it’s
not the only extremism shown growing through recent decades – far-right
British nationalism also gets some focus. However, the latter’s
increasing hold is treated with, if not sympathy, certainly some
understanding; in contrast, no remotely comparable approach is taken to
the growth of Wahhabism and the like. It wouldn’t have been that
hard to show younger Muslims perceiving a lack of rigour in their
antecedents’ practices, but instead what we’re shown is bigmouthed
youth simply disrespecting their elders and booming about “protecting
our territory”. The appearance of a Wahhabi imam with hooks
instead of both hands is clearly meant to be a cartoon, going one
further than the mono-hooked Abu Hamza; but when his portrayal becomes
an actual cartoon, a huge animation on the backdrop spouting lines of
offensiveness and hatred, it serves to remind us that cartoons aren’t
by definition funny, and can in fact be instruments of hatred
themselves. Pete Bishop’s other animations are amusing or blend
cleverly with the staging, but I’m afraid this one reminded me of
nothing so much as anti-Semitic cartoons across much of the last
century. I don’t think “hatred” is putting it too strongly.
More than once I felt myself on the verge of walking out, and pretty
much all that kept me in my seat was the desire to be able to discuss
it afterwards from a position of having seen it all.

Another problem leading to an imbalanced portrayal of Islam is that for
much of the second act even the principal “good Muslim”, as it were,
the character of Mushi, is shown being driven by a sense of religious
commission to sire twins and give one to the mosque. Although
little explicit comment is made on this matter, the subtext is that
it’s a pernicious delusion, and his redemption (so to speak) comes when
he frees himself from the idea and breaks with the mosque with which he
has been involved for decades. Yes, this break is explained in
terms of the extremism of the new imam, but there’s an untidiness of
connotation there which could have been taken care of with only a
little effort. I don’t think the argument that this is meant to
be a rough, untidy play – a pageant of sorts, staged by the inmates of
an asylum-seekers’ detention centre in a play-within-a-play framing
device – excuses such laxity.

Disturbed

For me, all of this devalues the attention paid throughout most of the
play to love: it seems to me to suggest, not that love is the end and
integration the means, but rather that love and intermarriage are
the greatest tool in the box, or perhaps the strongest weapon in the
arsenal, of integration or even assimilation. (I think Bean’s
endorsement moves from the former to the latter as the play
continues.) I have to say, there wasn’t the slightest harbinger
of this in the first half of the evening; throughout the interval I was
as confident as ever that the protesters were, as I said online,
earnest people missing the point that it’s about them in ways other
than they think. But the second half left me deeply disturbed,
and I don’t think that feeling’s going to lift for some time.